Reviews of Recent Publications

Abstract

As the first narrative to integrate the many dimensions of cybernetics into a single narrative, this book presents a new answer to this crucial question. For Ronald Kline, cybernetics was most critically a site of contestation, and more specifically of what sociologists term boundary work. Practitioners continuously fought over and redrew the borders of cybernetics, demarcating it from adjacent disciplines like information theory, general systems theory, and bionics, and dividing cybernetics itself into subdisciplines like management cybernetics and medical cybernetics. Many of the founders of the field had the ambition to create a universal discipline, but Kline emphasizes their failure to do so, as practitioners disagreed about the content of cybernetics, fractured it into more narrowly defined disciplines, or carried lessons back to traditional disciplines and, thus, abandoned the project of building a new one. Kline's emphasis on boundary work is supported by his careful attention to shifting alliances, discourses, and research programs. He points out, for example, that the cofounders of cybernetics who attended the Macy Conferences in the 1940s and 1950s focused on feedback and circular causality only in their first meetings; after about 1949, they fixed their attention firmly on the question of how to measure information. Concepts and discourses of information remain a central dimension of the book from that point forward; it devotes a chapter to how scientists constructed information theory as a distinct discipline in the 1950s, and another to how the phrases information technology and information society became ubiquitous tools for making sense of technology and society in the 1980s and 1990s. Kline's accounts of the relationships between cybernetics and the fringe are strongest in these accounts of the 1950s, when many of those involved were canonical founders of cybernetics.

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